What began as a chat between husband and wife has evolved into an intriguing scientific discovery. The results, published in May in BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) Open, show a “highly significant” correlation between periodic solar storms and incidences of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and giant cell arteritis (GCA), two potentially debilitating autoimmune diseases.

What began as a chat between husband and wife has evolved into an intriguing scientific discovery. The results, published in May in BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) Open, show a “highly significant” correlation between periodic solar storms and incidences of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and giant cell arteritis (GCA), two potentially debilitating autoimmune diseases.

At Escape Dynamics we are working on the next generation propulsion technologies with the goal of developing electromagnetically-powered engines operating at 10x the efficiency of chemical rockets. In this talk I will describe results of Escape Dynamics’ R&D efforts and outline our vision for the future of aerospace transportation. The primary focus of the talk will be on the technical aspects of external propulsion in which all or a part of the energy required for launch is coming from a ground-based array of microwave antennas configured to beam microwave energy to the vehicle.

More than a thousand extrasolar planets are now known, but most have been detected indirectly through Doppler shifts or photometric detection of eclipses. A handful have been directly imaged, using adaptive optics and diffraction control to suppress the light from the bright central star and reveal a planet 10^5 times fainter.

I will give an overview of directly detected planets and spectroscopic studies, which have revealed H2O, CO, and CH4 in exoplanet atmospheres.

At 10:44 p.m. on Thursday, March 12, NASA launched the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS), a set of four spacecraft that will study the magnetic fields surrounding Earth. Sent into space aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, the craft mark the first NASA mission dedicated to investigating magnetic reconnection, a mysterious phenomenon that gives rise to the northern lights, solar flares and geomagnetic storms that can disrupt cell phone service, black out power grids and damage orbiting satellites.

For over 60 years type II solar radio bursts have defied detailed quantitative explanation, despite their promise for predicting space weather at Earth and their status as the archetype for coherent radio emission stimulated by shocks.

Investigating long-term solutions to the world's energy needs and investing in sustainable technologies are crucial as the climate crisis comes into focus, a set of experts cautioned at Princeton University on Nov. 14.

Billions upon billions of neutrinos speed harmlessly through everyone’s body every moment of the day, according to cosmologists. The bulk of these subatomic particles are believed to come straight from the Big Bang, rather than from the sun or other sources. Experimental confirmation of this belief could yield seminal insights into the early universe and the physics of neutrinos. But how do you interrogate something so elusive that it could zip through a barrier of iron a light-year thick as if it were empty space?